Fear the Walking Dead: Dead in the Water

Fear the Walking Dead: Dead in the Water is a good example what's wrong with the whole TWD franchise since season 5 or 6 of the mothership TWD - the writing is lazy and not only occasionally plain stupid. I never was on board of a submarine but can't imagine that a zombie outbreak would overtake the crew in such a way (the show makes a convenient time jump, so the writers don't have to explain how the infected take over the sub), I just mention all those bulkheads, close them and you are save and/or you can confine the infected, on top, secure and control the Combat Information Center - easy work for a military crew, one might think. Anyway, the little show is not a total fail and not worse than the regular Fear the Walking Dead show (I must admit, that I do not watch that one anymore and missed the last two or three seasons) but you get just served the same lukewarm characters like in all the other shows, nothing really makes sense or provides real suspense, it's like eating a cheeseburger while you still do some stuff on your machine.

I've been on a TWD Universe binge for the last several months. I'm almost caught up for the new mini series! With that said... I've watched every single web series and let me say... most of them have been terrible. But this one? It's high quality. It was written well. I loved it. It was great seeing Nick Stahl again and he once again proves he is an amazing actor. Right now? This web series killed FTWD Season 7. Which is really terrible. I wish they would put the same effort into FTWD they did into this mini series. I do really enjoy seeing everyone's origin stories. The show doesn't concentrate enough on that.

...because every once in a while, things didn't make logical sense. And over the seasons, it just added up as did my frustration. So I gave up on them.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this 41-minute story.

(Was looking forward to five more episodes, but apparently, this was all 6 mini episodes in one)

The premise in the show decription makes it look like it all takes place inside a submarine. It only STARTS in a submarine. Great cast, though the dialogue mostly sounds wooden in the first episode. The timing was way off in some scenes. But the thing that really botthered me was the atrocious makeup job done on the undead. I swear, the white makeup is no better than circus clown makeup. A couple zombies looked like they had zinc oxide cream thickly spread on their faces. I could actually see the THICK outline of the cake makeup. This made it impossible to take them seriously.

The director needs to quit his damn job as he obviously doesn't seem to pay attention to detail. Go back to being a producer, dude. Money is your wheelhouse, not directing.

I get it, TWD and FTWD writers all assume their audiences have very short attention spans.

"Dead in the water" is a great example of this. Simply put, why was everyone turning so quickly?

I don't know when it changed, but somewhere around season 7-8 of TWD, and around season 5 in FTWD, walkers started turning more quickly. Instead of a change that took 1-2 days after death, or after a bite, suddenly shortened drastically to hours, or minutes in some cases

My assumption for continuity sake was that as the virus evolved over time, it turned the dead faster.

This "short" or whatever you want to call it throws all that convention out the window. Why were these initial outbreak zombies turning in minutes?

For the sake of the story and direction itself, I also found it hard to believe over 100 navy soldiers would so easily succumb to zombie attack. "Noooo...zombie slowly approaching...should I move? Do anything to avoid the attack? Fight back even? Nah!" TWD / FTWD always paints every soldier as incredibly incompetent in every series, completely incapable of defending themselves from slow-moving attackers.

Bottom line, these directors are just so sloppy, all the time, and this episode broke no new ground, it goes exactly like you expected it would.

However, as a plus, I will say I'm a big fan of Nick Stahl's acting, including in this. I wish he was in more things.